If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.